


go further in hope

by sassy_ninja



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anger, Angst and Tragedy, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, It's not Courfeyrac's Fault, Miscommunication, Out of Character, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:48:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29198631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassy_ninja/pseuds/sassy_ninja
Summary: Enjolras is supposed to be the one to lead them into the glorious future, but in a revolution things do not turn out the way they have been so meticulously planned. Courfeyrac is left hurting and scrambling to try and lead his friends into a new dawn, but some things cannot change and there are some futures that we will not see.
Relationships: Combeferre & Courfeyrac & Enjolras (Les Misérables), Courfeyrac & Enjolras (Les Misérables), Courfeyrac & Marius Pontmercy
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	go further in hope

**Author's Note:**

> ok so yes I did write this in a few hours and I'll probably come back later to edit it bc god knows this isn't proofread enough but I can't get this idea out of my head so *jazz hands* here it is. sorry in advance and I'm especially sorry to courfeyrac poor baby has to deal w some shit

You would think that lightning is loud, that you could hear a thunderbolt roaring down to earth and splitting apart the ground, but the wrath of god is silent, what you hear is the booming of the thunder afterwards. It’s the aftermath that’s always the loudest, the kind that rings in your ears for hours afterwards.

In the storm of bullets that rains down onto the barricade no one hears the one that pierces Enjolras, in the scrambling mess of bodies and blood no one sees the sun fall from its perch and topple silently onto the streets below. It’s quiet, unknown, quick. Just a lightning bolt down from the heavens that no one sees and a the thunder that doesn’t roar until hours later.

It’s Jehan that finds his body first. He stares down at it, blinking his eyes slowly before he crumples to his knees without a single sound.

“What’s wrong, Je–” Bossuet comes over kindly, a little worriedly, but then he cuts himself off. What’s wrong is perfectly clear.

One by one everyone gathers, each silent and standing carefully as if the very ground beneath them is shaking. It might as well be. Courfeyrac arrives last, fashionably late as he always is and how ironic that he was the one looking for where Enjolras could have slipped off to. They part for him like a tired sea.

He thinks for a moment that this is what a child feels when they see their gods are nothing more than pretty panes of glass, smashed and broken against the ground. The unending burning of the loss of faith. He loses his in that moment, on that barricade, looking at Enjolras lying there on the ground with his head cradled in Combeferre’s lap and his eyes staring distantly at the sky. You can barely see the blood against his red waistcoat, just one ragged hole in his chest that killed a god.

He crouches down and touches his hand, it’s already cold. His hands were always cold in life too, bad circulation he would say and in the winter Courfeyrac would cheerfully lend him his gloves (a very fashionable yellow) to help him warm them up. If he closes his eyes maybe Enjolras’ hand will twitch and this will all have been some too big practical joke. He was never one for pranks, but maybe this time will be different.

“What do we do?” asks Joly hollowly.

Everyone stares at Combeferre who doesn’t even react, smiling and stroking his hand over Enjolras’ hair as if he’s somewhere else entirely, and then they all turn to look at Courfeyrac. He feels the weight of their stares acutely, pressing down on every inch of his skin.

They’d planned for this, of course they had, what kind of leader would Enjolras have been if he hadn’t planned for his own demise? Not a good one and he could only have been the best. There was a detailed chain of command, both Combeferre and Courfeyrac knew exactly how to step into his place if the worst were to happen.

“I trust you both,” Enjolras had said to them all those weeks ago, squeezing Courfeyrac’s shoulder, “I know that you will make the right decisions.”

Now though all that surety is gone, he rocks back onto his feet a little unevenly and glances at Combeferre, hoping desperately that he will stand too. Instead, he finds his warm gaze looking up at him.

“We have to carry on,” he says, voice faltering and then slowly growing in strength, “the revolution has never been with its leaders, we carry it together. He would not want us to give up, we have to continue fighting for him, for every single person who gave their life to this cause. We must see this through, for them and for the ones who still carry on.”

He speaks with more conviction than he has, but it seems to work. They cheer, even with tears in their eyes and slowly, one by one they disperse again.

* * *

And so Courfeyrac moves from the centre to the leader. There’s no more time for thinking, even less time for feeling. He deals with each problem with a detached hollowness: the spy, losing Jehan, losing Gavroche, losing Bahorel. All he can do is lose the things that he scrabbles to keep close to his chest, fingers so slick with blood that they all end up slipping away.

He shoots Javert himself, not wincing as the blood splatters into his mouth. It tastes like bitter iron, he wonders if Enjolras’ blood would have tasted the same. It burns as he swallows, like he’s drinking lead and it sits in his chest like a bullet, aching, aching, aching.

“Courfeyrac, I’m sorry,” Combeferre says, pulling him aside as the night falls, “I’ve not filled my duty, left everything to you. We need to take action now though, the other barricades have already fallen, we’re the last ones left. We need to retreat.”

“What do you mean retreat? We can’t retreat, what the hell are you talking about?” he snaps back, harsher than he means to. His chest is burning like there’s a fire inside of it. He wants to scream, he wants to curl up into a little ball and let his mother sweep him up into her arms again. He doesn’t know what he’s doing but he knows that he’s angry and that it hurts and that he wishes more than anything that Enjolras was still here to help make it all make sense again.

“I’m sorry, we won’t make it through the day tomorrow. We need to cut our losses, we can regroup, reorganise – this is not the end, this is just the beginning,” Combeferre says, reaching his hand out for Courfeyrac to take.

He slaps it away, disgusted, “you would have Enjolras die in vain? Have Jehan? Bahorel? You would let their sacrifices be for nothing and run like a dog with your tail between your legs?”

Combeferre recoils, hurt and shakes his head, “Courfeyrac they died so we could live, if we die here then the revolution dies with us. If we die then there is no more hope, but if we live then there is tomorrow and there is the day after that. The future will come, Courfeyrac, but not if we’re not there to see it.”

The anger fills his veins slowly, it’s like poison. It burns, he wants to scratch his own skin off, tear out his teeth. “And what will we do? Hide like rats until the gendarmerie hunt us down one by one and throw us into the Bastille? We’ll be executed for this – I’d rather take as many of those bastards with me as I go than rot away in a jail-cell waiting for trial.”

“There are revolutionaries before that have escaped trial,” Combeferre says, a little desperately, “besides we could leave, we could go to England–”

“England?” Courfeyrac laughs in disbelief, “you would abandon France as well as your brothers? Fine, if you want to run then go, I won’t stop you or anyone who wants to join you. Anyone who isn’t a coward will stay though, anyone who won’t let their friends’ deaths be for nothing.”

Combeferre just shakes his head, eyes filled with a sadness Courfeyrac cannot describe, so bottomless and pleading that he has to look away. He reaches his hand out once again with a quiet, “Enjolras would not want this.”

“Enjolras is dead,” is all he says back, walking away.

* * *

Around half their men go with Combeferre, leaving the barricades feeling too empty and too filled with ghosts. Bossuet goes, Feuilly and Joly stay. Courfeyrac sits, the burning in his chest slowly flickering out until he feels hollow again, light as ash and just as easy to blow away. How could it have come to this? Just a few hours earlier he was following Enjolras into a dawn so glorious that it was almost blinding and now he sits alone with half his friends gone and the others already dead, himself just waiting to join them.

“Courfeyrac are you alright?” someone asks and he blinks, surprised to see Marius still here and looking down at him worriedly.

He nods quickly and then stops, reconsidering, “maybe you should go,” he says quietly, “if you’re quick you can still make it. You never believed in this – the republic, why die for it? You have that girl, Cosette, you still have a whole world to live for.”

Marius just shakes his head with a smile, “you’re my friend Courfeyrac, I won’t leave you.”

And he doesn’t, not until the very end when Courfeyrac sees him go down and this time too the lightning is silent. He does not live long enough afterwards to hear the thunder.

He stands alone and unarmed in the upper room of the Corinthe, panting and bloody. Behind the line of National Guardsmen he sees Grantaire stagger to his feet from behind a table and he gives Courfeyrac a low mournful stare before he slinks away unseen.

“Shoot me,” Courfeyrac says simply. As they raise their rifles he’s so afraid that he’s trembling, but then he glances out of the window at the sliver of blue sky and thinks about Combeferre, about how he will live and how he will rise up again. Somehow, the future doesn’t seem so bleak, not when he knows that there is still someone out there waiting to lead it towards a dawn that will surely come. 

The shots ring out into the silence like a low rumble of thunder echoing across Paris.

**Author's Note:**

> ahaha I did say sorry in advance... but um if u enjoyed this then pls leave a kudo and a comment!! or come and shout at me on my [twitter](https://twitter.com/lesbiancourf) where u can see all my dumb ideas before I write them. 
> 
> also if u want to feel even sadder after reading this: imagine how combeferre feels after essentially abandoning courfeyrac to die and losing both his best friends in the span of a day :) have fun!


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